I'm excited to announce that our Java-based desktop game, Just Tactics (http://www.justtactics.com), is now in public alpha. You can sign up for an account at the website. Clients are available for Windows and 32-bit linux (or 64-bit linux with ia32 compatability packages). When the game is out of alpha, unpaid players will only have access to the default deployment. But, during the alpha, everybody has access to the deployment editor.

Just Tactics is built on a customized version of jMonkeyEngine 3, and uses JRuby extensively for scripting and special effects. I'm also pleased to announce a few useful libraries available on github (https://github.com/HitTheSticks). These include Sploosh, a 100% Java real time fluid dynamics simulation; and alamode, a flyweight auto-update framework.

The website design got left too late in the process, I readily admit. We've hired someone to remedy that situation. But good design takes time, and we wanted to get gameplay feedback as soon as we felt the game was stable.

There's no single player mode. I'm not good at AI, I'm afraid. I preferred to focus on solid network play instead of writing a brain-dead opponent.

That said, if you're interested in writing a bot that plays Just Tactics from the client side, we've discussed having official "bot accounts" that people could use to run AI they've written. We're not sure how exactly that would work, or what sort of API we could provide, but we're open to discussing that.

We couldn't find *any* sort of reasonable update framework for Java. The best suggestions we got were "use the eclipse plugin system", which is hardly a good match for a video game; and, "use Java WebStart", which doesn't work unless you want updating a 1KiB FX script to require another download of the whole 300MiB jar file. The handful of other (abandoned) frameworks we found all required protocol-specific servers, which we had no confidence would scale well. Likewise, there are no cross-platform commercial offerings that we could find, short of enterprise-grade internal deployment tools.

I wrote alamode so that it would work in the most basic environment available for publishing files: a web server. And it's written to be easy to use, with a simple one-way synchronization model with no deletion.

It's been working for us for several months in the office. We'll see how it survives our growing player base.

Hey, just wanted to let everybody know that we've moved well past alpha into beta. The game is playing and looking great.

We've got a new scoring system to replace the one-dimensional win conditions in the alpha, private matchmaking queues for paid accounts (play with a friend or organize a tournament), nearly all art assets are in place, and most audio assets are in place. We anticipate about eight weeks until everything is done and we're at v1.0.

It means we need to test Ubuntu 13...we are still running 12.I don't suspect that 13 would be a problem though, so check out this page: http://justtactics.wikia.com/wiki/Linux_SupportMost likely you don't have 32 bit compatibility libraries installed.

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